What Does it Mean to “Lose Work”?

Posted on February 20, 2012 by carolyncooke| Leave a comment

Once, a famous public intellectual/writer and her lover from Chicago came to visit in California. In preparation, I took all the paper trash to my office (a remote cabin) to burn in the woodstove. We had a wonderful vinous evening, and in the morning took a walk around our property.  Overnight, my writing studio had caught fire;  the windows had gone black. Of course I had my laptop, my hard drive, so it was hard to know exactly what was lost, or just charred, damaged, smoky, ruined. I had always saved everything – handwritten stuff, edited stuff, embarrassing stuff, essential stuff, prima materia, evidence. The famous public intellectual entered my smoldering den and took in the scene.  “So you’ve lost all your early work,” she said. “Do you care?”

A year or so later I published my first book.

 

 

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The Rumpus Interview: Susan Zakin in Conversation with Carolyn Cooke

Posted on December 26, 2011 by carolyncooke| Leave a comment

In Carolyn Cooke’s recent novel, Daughters of the Revolution, Cooke set the mark of her anger, along with her exquisite sentences, on the ultimate crucible of American male power. The book drew opposing reactions from critical circles. In The San Francisco Chronicle, Susanna Sonnenberg literally ordered people to read Daughters of the Revolution, calling it “ferocious” and “astonishing.” Cooke, she wrote, “can reinvent the known with imagery so fine and excruciating it feels like a dare.” But Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post blasted Cooke’s novel, comparing it unfavorably to the 1964 Louis Auchincloss novel The Rector of Justin, and accused Cooke of ham-fisted political correctness.

The novel’s inciting incident is a boating accident in the early 1960s that kills a young father while sparing his wealthy companion. Although the novel’s action spans decades, it never reaches beyond the geographic confines of New England and New York. Yet Daughters of the Revolution’s epiphanic ending calls down all the tragedy of the North and South. We recently spoke at her home in northern California.

***

The Rumpus: When I read your short story collection, The Bostons, I had a sensory hit of New England: the old floorboards, the smell of summer. But you’ve been living on the north coast of California for quite a while now. Is California culture where the novel’s surreal sensibility comes from?

Carolyn Cooke: Hawthorne is pretty surreal. Most New England writers are echoing a little bit of Hawthorne’s surrealism. Someone in a negative review called my book an example of hysterical realism. He cited me along with Zadie Smith and some other writers I really respect. It was a negative review, but great company. The review was meant to be negative, but I liked the description. I understand the impulse to not be a realist. I don’t think I am fundamentally a realist even though I’m interested in reality, in texture,  in commentary, in the meta story. Realism can be tedious. I’ m not interested in writing it.

Rumpus: It’s laborious.

Cooke: I have a hard time having characters pour milk in their coffee. I’m pleased when people say that it’s not quite in a realist tradition.

Rumpus: In terms of place, Boston is the epicenter of the American class system, isn’t it? Louis Auchincloss and Ward Just were categorical in their descriptions of Boston.

Cooke: It used to be. That was one of the differences I noticed when I came to California. In New England, it was so hard for people to move beyond cultural assumptions that people made because you were black, or you were a woman, or you lived in a certain neighborhood or you were poor.

Rumpus: And you were poor.

Cooke: (hesitates) My mother and I were poor, yeah. She was a substitute teacher for most of my childhood. A single parent.

Rumpus: Where did you live?

Cooke: We lived in a number of places. We sometimes housesat for people. We lived in Newton, Massachusetts most of the time when I was very young. When I was 10 we moved to Bar Harbor, Maine. My mother’s father was a Swedish immigrant who built houses there. He built her a house based on a design she made in a home ec class in eighth grade. She still lives there. It’s a fabulous house. It has a tower. It’s very whimsical.

Rumpus: Daughters of the Revolution focuses on a specific period of time in a specific place, when New England prep schools were taking cautious steps toward integration and co-education. Around the same time, Boston was in the throes of a violent controversy over school busing. The violence in South Boston was after your moved to Maine, wasn’t it?

Cooke: Yes, but I was aware of it. Initially I wanted to write a book about busing.

Rumpus: I can see how that idea morphed into Carole, the African-American girl who is admitted to the boys’ prep school by mistake. It’s remarkable how much the discussion of school integration has changed, isn’t it? We seem to have given up on integration in the schools. Now we talk about identity, which is fine, but I wonder if the price we pay is further fragmentation of the polity. Do you think an obsession with race can blind us to issues of class? Is there a vacuum in the arts and the national debate when it comes to class?

Cooke: I’m really disturbed by the increasing emphasis at elite schools and elsewhere on meritocracy. You look at the Ivy League colleges, which are so racially and ethnically diverse, and yet so filled with wealthy, privileged kids from all over the world. It’s also true at the California state schools, increasingly, as the tuition goes up. It’s called “merit” and it means the kids whose parents are wealthy enough to get them the preparation they need to get into those schools. I’m fearful of a world that loves those who have merit and ignores those who don’t.

Rumpus: What’s the index of “merit”?

Cooke: Right, right. There’s a phenomenon of what my friend David Rothkopf calls the super class, and it’s international. This is who rules the world. They’re all colors and all creeds and it’s just as egalitarian as it could be, except they’re all the super people, the people who make the decisions, who run the corporations, who create the culture, who hold the money. The issue is no longer “Are people treated equally because of their background?” The issue is that most people aren’t treated equally and only a few people are.

Rumpus: The intensity of that comes through at the ending of your book. I was so angry after I finished that book, I was a total bitch for three days.

Cooke: Why, thank you! (laughs)

Rumpus: (laughs) The ending of the book, to me, was about global inequality. I don’t know if that was what you intended. This isn’t an historical book, it’s not a curiosity, it’s not limited to the 60s and 70s, or drawing a self-conscious parallel between an earlier time and ours. The surreal aspects of the book gave it a larger scope, I thought, without confusing the reader. Were you thinking about these larger kinds of inequality or was I projecting?

Cooke: We all have a different lens, or several lenses. You’ve spent a lot of time looking at the world through the lens of the environment. How does the environment get affected in a poor country? A colonized country? I’ve always seen the world through the lens of class.

Rumpus: My lens also tends to be political. The political novel gets a bad rap as being by definition didactic or second rate literature, but I wonder if there’s a new urgency now, with two wars going on and economic hard times that wasn’t there before? Are American writers are looking beyond the suburban cul de sac?

Cooke: Oh, yeah. I remember all these stories about men in some huge indescribable existential struggle. Just like anybody else, I read Philip Roth, and Updike, and Cheever, and Raymond Carver. Carver brought the class card to the table, but kind of relentlessly. And they’re very male, and they’re very much about their mortality, and the women are unreal. It was such a breath of air that there were people trying to tell weird, big stories from all around the world.

Rumpus: A few of those guys wrote great sex scenes. Richard Ford. That guy could make it new. Yours are very good, too. How do you write about sex?

Cooke: I think it’s hard, too. With Daughters of the Revolution, I wanted to write a book about the sexual revolution, and I realized after a certain point that I had to write about sex. I wanted to explore the history of bad sex.

Rumpus: That would be a great book title.

Cooke: I did it very diligently, the way I do everything. I had a certain amount of experience, which I brought to bear. (laughter) I think it’s of service to the book, even if you’re not a realist. Because the way they look at sex changes over time. Your characters, I mean.

Rumpus: So the actress does a nude scene if it’s artistically merited. Makes sense. I do see a common ground in your novel, despite its brevity, with the large canvas novels you’re referring to. What are you reading now?

Cooke: I’m reading nonfiction, because I’m interested in the intersection of sex and drugs and how drugs lubricated things in New England at a certain time. In fiction, I was just reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I was thinking that there are such giant stories that people from Africa or India are telling. Adiga does such a great job at showing multiple facets of a country but also telling a Dostoevskian story about a criminal. It’s literary and character-based but also doing this hard work of illuminating culture and society, and looking into the present and the future.

In English, there haven’t been these giant stories that try to explain a nation, explain these huge historic events, at least recently. I think of young people coming up, and feeling there’s this huge obligation to tell stories that haven’t been told before. But in some sense that’s what every novel does. Every novel has the lens that grabs at you.

···
Susan Zakin is the author of Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement and editor of the anthology Naked: Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth. A fictionalized African prep school (“the Eton of West Africa”) plays a role in her forthcoming novel, The Afterlife of Victor Kamara. www.susanzakin.com

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The Interpreter

Posted on October 6, 2011 by carolyncooke| Leave a comment

Your book has a season. Mine was Summer. Daughters of the Revolution appeared in bookstores on June 6th. (Booksellers hold their copies back so your book can – shazam! – appear on the shelves on publication day, and begin the mad dash to be noticed.) Soon after this I went on the road from the Bay Area to Chicago, New York, New England and Los Angeles in the grand tradition, stopping in a new city every night or two, trying to lure friends (and their friends, and all our mutual Facebook friends and Twitter followers) into bookstores to a reading – and to buy the book. Touring is a shameless act of seduction: fun, humiliating, sexy – and (over time) a little grueling.

One day I drove from New York City to Concord, Massachusetts, through thunder, lightening and rain so torrential it actually held the windshield wipers in mid-arc. The Taconic Parkway was a muggy blur; I might have been driving down a water slide. In Concord I stayed at an inn dating from 1700 and drank a beer with an old friend and former editor from a pewter tankard once used by Paul Revere. (I may be making this up.) Concord is, of course, the birthplace of a Revolution – but not the sexual revolution described in somewhat relentless detail in my book.

The bookstore looked cozy – a port in the storm. But who would come out in such weather? The bookseller, of course. My friend/editor. The sister of someone in my writing group came; she lives just down the street. The mother of a former student appeared, nudged by her son who, because he lives in Africa, couldn’t attend. Two men came in together, and I was moved by the kindness of strangers. “Thank you for coming,” I confided – often a bad idea. “You’re the only people here I don’t know. I’m so glad you’re not just some long-lost cousins!”

“Actually,” said the older of the two men, “I am your mother’s cousin.”

Dickie!

What a strange object is your own book. It emerges into the marketplace as if it were an ordinary product, marked with its promise of quality control – what I have come to think of as the “wall of praise” that backs it up. Your sentences, ideas and images, the whole atmosphere and world you’ve created, are pitched and packaged (except in e-book form, where the print is detached from its platen and distilled into an essence, like vodka from a potato). Next thing, if you are lucky, you stand peering across the wild terrain of your id and ego into the faces of strangers – and the broadest swath of your ancient intimates. You open your book, which, in a sudden weird reversal, you are here to interpret and embody. You straighten up, find your voice, look them all in the eye, and pretend to read.

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Chronicles of Sexual Revolution 2. Exploring the Psychic Playpen: A Conversation with Poet Brynn Saito

Posted on May 27, 2011 by carolyncooke| 1 Comment

Interview by BRYNN SAITO, program coordinator for the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry

Carolyn Cooke is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and author of Daughters of the Revolution, a novel to be published by Knopf/Doubleday on June 7, 2011. Her short story collection, “The Bostons,” was a winner of PEN/ Bingham Award for a first book and a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway. Her fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and in two volumes each of “Best American Short Stories” and “Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.” 

Your novel, Daughters of the Revolution, will be published on June 7. What is the novel about?

The novel begins with sexual revolutions in New England, the time of integration and busing and the beginning of co-education in previously all-male schools.

Yale became co-ed around 1969 and prestigious old prep schools in Boston began to admit girls around then. So many radical divides and challenges to the culture had surfaced—from the Vietnam War to the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and the introduction of the speculum as a tool of consciousness! The gritty atmosphere and sexual politics of the time impressed me. Of course, I was a kid.

What comes first for you in the writing process—the characters, a scene, a political movement you want to engage? How does the writing begin?

I recently borrowed a copy of that immense, gorgeous edition of Carl Jung’s Red Book and spent about a week reading it in bed. What an experience, to immobilize yourself before a big book – the record of a personal, psychotic process. Writing is always autobiographical in the sense that it comes from you and through you – but, as for Jung, it’s not necessarily autobiography. For me, story starts with language, sound; I start to hear something.

My first book came out exactly ten years ago. Ten years! And Daughters of the Revolution is a very slender book—it’s like a haiku of a novel. I also wrote a collection of stories in that time, called Amor and Psycho, which is coming out next year. So I procrastinated from the novel by writing the stories, which are about sex and angst. I write slowly and cut much, more like a poet than a novelist, maybe – always trying to make the words say more than they want to. The novel takes place over the course of 40 years, so a lot of time passes even though it’s very compressed.

To hear you say you write a like a poet makes a lot of sense to me.  Your writing is so emotionally and linguistically precise, and lyrical at the same time.

I don’t think anyone will confuse Daughters of the Revolution with poetry, but I did try to capture the tone of a period—from the early 1970s through the early years of the 21st century—and also how the tone changed, and how that shift was influenced by economic policies and social realities and changes in sexual politics. That’s really what interests me—the tonal feeling. Not plot so much.

How did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Some people want to explore the psychic playpen; other people – artists and psychologists, for example – have to, they just can’t not. One of our students was just telling me about a parent, gravely ill, who is devastated because she has so much in her mind, in her soul, that she feels is going to be lost when she dies. I agree that’s an intolerable situation – to feel that you haven’t been able to say something out loud to the world that only you can say.

I relate to that. There’s the world in your mind and the urgency to get it out in order to be your most real self.

The world in your mind, exactly. It’s not fundamentally a matter of self-expression. It’s invention, creation – making something potentially better and stranger and more lasting than you are.

As an associate professor in the Institute’s Writing and Consciousness MFA program, what does “consciousness” mean to you?

Not every writer writes from an interest in consciousness; I’m not sure I think of myself that way. Some writers are more interested in storytelling, or plot, or pure abstraction, or ideas, or history. Many of our students have stories that they urgently want to tell that have some political or social dimension or point of view they feel hasn’t been captured in language before.

Consciousness is who you are, but it’s not autobiography – it’s not factual, or even knowable. It’s not self-conscious; it’s open to larger currents. It reveals you in relation to other human beings, the knowledge we share that is beyond geography or culture. The more particular and precise you become in certain kinds of writing, the more other people are able to see something that you maybe didn’t even know or intend, and say, Wow, that’s exactly how it is. My interest in consciousness isn’t really personal; it’s the way in which consciousness is shared.

That reminds me a line from a blog post of yours: “The job of the reporter is to give us facts and evidence, causes and effects. The job of the fiction writer is to refuse the simple story we thought we knew, to inscribe indelible marks on our soul.” So writing fiction is a different kind of truth-telling

Don’t you think poetry is that, too?

Yes.

I think that’s a real comfort to people who are starting to write: you don’t actually have to know much in advance. It’s probably better if you don’t. “Telling the truth” isn’t just saying what you think you already know, it’s when you’re writing with your hand as much as from your head and you start trying to corral the unsayable, and the words start to make patterns that you suddenly know how to read.

Do you have any rules and rituals as a writer?

The only rule is that I have to do it all the time. Within that, I’m free. I love what Julia Whitty said about living like a monk to keep the portal open. I don’t live like a monk, I live like a maniac, but I try to keep the portal (as I understand it) open and get to my desk before I really wake up. I try to write something before I get out of bed, or open my eyes.

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Chronicles of Sexual Revolution 1: Sex, Cars and Aesthetics

Posted on May 14, 2011 by carolyncooke| Leave a comment

Looking back, I owe the development of my adult aesthetic to my first boyfriend’s terrific taste in cars. In the years we dated I was so shy I never uttered his name – it was Billy – though we managed to find intimacy in other ways that are inextricably linked in my mind with a Ford Falcon coupe and a 1966 Morris Mini Cooper. My general awakening occurred in 1973, the year I became aware of Richard Nixon as a dramatic character, and the beginning (for me) of the special period known as the sexual revolution. I spent every day that summer babysitting a curly-headed child who napped through the numbing Watergate hearings, which I watched on the family’s black and white television while their retriever obsessively humped my leg. Mostly, I sympathized with the dog’s longing – his desperation, really. Evenings and weekends, Billy and I drove around the island where we lived, walked along the shore paths and on the beach, climbed the rocky granite mountains – and drove around in awkward silence, as I was too shy to speak.

Much more than any specific physical contact between us, I remember the feelings produced by Billy’s appearance at my house in his Ford Falcon or his Morris Mini. I remember my mother’s near-panic, a generalized condition having to do with roads, snow, boys, accidents. The thrill of seeing her eyes wide with a sort of terrified anticipation. The only thing she wasn’t worried about was sex. Copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Joy of Sex, and The Sensuous Woman by J stood stacked up on our living room coffee table next to a silver box of cigarettes. The tableau – sex books, cigarettes – looked composed, like some kind of organized suggestion. Or like homework.

Women my mother’s age were all going crazy with restlessness and envy, reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, or else they were divorcing, changing everything. My mother, who was already single, had always driven big, round, hand-me-down cars from my nana – a 1955 Chevy and later a 1959 Nash Rambler. The cars came to us because they were too old to be reliable in the frigid New England winters. I remember the heavy sound of dead alternators, the wheeze of their flooded engines as I sat beside my mother on the long bench seat, beltless, almost weightless, my knee socks pulled up and my required dress pulled down to cover my knees, knobbed and white as frosted cupcakes. Our family cars were a testament to outdated values – roundness, stability, dim coloring, American-ness. My mother was trying to bust loose – to liberate herself from the constraints of the cold-war conservative patriarchal structures that oppressed her economically and socially. When she finally got tenure on the cusp of the Me Decade she bought her first new car, a brand-new orange Maverick with a spoiler and black racing stripes.

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Gaddafi’s Official Outfits and Other Works of the Imagination

Posted on April 21, 2011 by carolyncooke| 1 Comment

In the early years, while I tapped away every morning imagining that my novel would be finished soon, the editor of a local anarcho-syndicalist newspaper for which I sometimes wrote suffered from an interesting delusion. He believed that the writer Thomas Pynchon had been writing letters to his paper in the guise of a bag lady who lived under a bridge in Fort Bragg and drank in a bar called the Tip Top. Why did he think this? I don’t remember. The letters were funny, crazy, vivid. The editor found people who believed him, and even helped publish a scholarly, heavily-footnoted volume of the letters (and his own famously funny, vivid replies). The volume parsed every line of the letters for Pynchon lore; not surprisingly, the letters contained the seeds of other Pynchon novels, and references to Gravity’s Rainbow, V and Vineland abounded, all excruciatingly documented. Pynchon ended up having nothing to do with writing those letters to the paper. But the volume exists – made in equal parts of imagination and argument – an almost perfect work of fiction.

The truth turned out to be another story, revealed when the letter-writer murdered his wife – bludgeoned her to death and kept her maimed body in their cabin until it began to decompose. Days later the letter-writer drove his truck off a cliff, killing himself and causing further insult to his wife. The letter writer, the killer, turned out to have been a frustrated poet. The letters to the paper – and the scholarly work they inspired – represented the zenith of his literary career, and the work for which he will be remembered.

Even what we think of as “reality” is constructed by imagination. Look at Muammar Gaddafi’s official outfits. Look at a human heart, an eye. Tell me, tell me, where does fiction come from?

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Egyptomaniac

Posted on February 6, 2011 by carolyncooke| Leave a comment

Like many people all over the world this week, I’ve gorged myself on whatever information I can find about the people’s revolution in Egypt. I watch Al Jazeera English while listening in the background to CNN, scanning updates from the New York Times and the BBC, and following six or seven Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and blogs. In the face of such relentless “connection,” who has time to read?

Writers constantly experiment to find how various shades of “meaning” can be conveyed by information and atmosphere, description and detail. Many of the narratives we (as writers and readers) value are not “informative” in a 24-hour cycle way; they speak to other urgencies, which in heated moments feel harder to articulate. What kinds of information and description best broadcast the “situation” on the ground? What kinds of detail evoke the atmosphere and context of the larger social-economic-cultural-historical picture?

Dare I mention – novels, essays, memoirs?

The late, great Cairo-raised Palestinian critic and public intellectual Edward Said, who so eloquently challenged and dissected the western construct of “Orientalism,” describes in an essay called “After Mahfouz” the ways in which “narrative prose fiction played a crucial role in creating a national consciousness” in Egypt and the Arab world, and how “Arabic novelists stood squarely wherever issues of destiny, society and direction were being debated or investigated.”

This weekend, I’ll be turning back to a few works of fiction and nonfiction born of Egypt, to tap into the deeper currents of last week’s events.

André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir
Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley, The Thief and the Dogs, and Miramar
Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile

Finally, I’ll take a sneak peek at “El Shooq,” the photo portfolio by noted musicologist and resident of Cairo, Kristina Nelson, which will appear in the CIIS literary magazine, Mission at Tenth, later this spring. The portfolio documents the shooting of the recently-released film “El Shooq” (Translated as “Lust”) by author and screenwriter Sayed Ragab – as well as compelling photos of Tahrir Square in the “Days of Hope.”

What books, images and other texts and works have moved you to think more deeply about Egypt and the Middle East?

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Carolyn Cooke is an Associate Professor in the Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry MFA Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the author of the novel, Daughters of the Revolution, forthcoming in June from Alfred A. Knopf.

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Going Graphic: The Comics and Tragics of Mere Literary Mortals

Posted on November 29, 2010 by carolyncooke| 4 Comments

A few years ago I drew a couple of spontaneous, semi-tragic comics. One described events on the day my father died, and the other an afternoon in 1998 when my 98-year-old grandmother demanded that we visit the pet cemetery; she no longer wished to be buried on top of her husband in the family plot. I’d worked over this material before – writing is for me a form of chewing – but it felt both too charged and too ridiculous. The visual aspects of both stories overwhelmed my desire to describe them in words. And so, with my poor spatial sense and stick figure skills, I drew them. The form – the structure of the four boxes – opened three-dimensionally; my pen moved in a new way, described a wheelchair pushed by my then-three-year old daughter up a vertiginous hill into the pet cemetery. Choosing a few visual elements and severely limiting the narrative opened both stories up. Four panels, and suddenly, the stories made sense.

A few of the most intensely imagined novels I’ve read over the past decade (or two) have been, well, graphic: Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (The Holocaust) and In the Shadow of No Towers (9/11); Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (Iranian Revolution of 1979), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (a young lesbian comes out more or less simultaneously with her father). Last Saturday night, Gene Luen Yang came to CIIS to talk about his trajectory from comics geek to author of American-Born Chinese, the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award.

The quality that allows comics to handle serious, even tragic subjects, Yang says, is “intimacy.” Comics remind me inexorably of the seductive spinning drugstore racks of my youth, filled with cheap newsprint stories whose cachet consisted almost entirely of my economic power to acquire and devour them. (One working definition of “intimacy” must certainly be early experience of greedy possession.)
But the comic is also – by the very limits of the frame – a withholding medium. Roland Barthes described engagement by the reader brought about by the author’s refusal to reveal the whole story as “writerly” fiction. The reader “reads” into the text – “enters” it in an erotic and (if you are lucky enough to have this sort of imagination) a literal sense. Spiegelman’s Jewish mice, or the simply rendered, repetitive masses of veiled women in Satrapi’s Persepolis, or the father in Fun Home, the funeral director with a fever for restoration, are all wittily, charmingly rendered – and serious as death. The device of the frame is also an invitation to the gaze.

I thought again of these frames last night, while watching the Iranian Director Abbas Kiarostami’s brilliantly intimate film, “10.” The film consists of ten scenes that take place entirely within a car, as a young-ish Iranian woman, a photographer, divorced, loosely veiled, drives around Tehran. Everything we know about the woman, the city and the social, religious and political culture she inhabits comes from her seemingly casual conversation within the “frame” of the car, as the woman talks with her son, her sister, and even picks up strangers, including an old woman, a young, spurned would-be bride, and a prostitute.

The narrative never enters the mind of the woman; there’s no internal monologue, no voice-over. Yet frame is, if not quite a “voice,” a definite point of view. The constraints of the film echo the cultural and gender constraints upon the woman. We see her up close, all revealing surface – perhaps more intimately than she can see herself. The constraint of the frame (and possibly even the constraint of making such a revealing film in an authoritarian theocratic country like Iran) becomes part of the power of the story. This is not a psychologically nuanced story “about” a divorced female photographer living in Iran; it is, arguably, a more difficult thing – a story about the relentless surface of the world.

In conversation with poet Brynn Saito, Gene Yang described how as a kid he was drawn to the “two-in-one” clash-of-titans adventures like “Thing” and “Rom.” He persevered in solitary authorship, becoming weirder and more singular, as writers often do. In the world of comics, however, “self-publishing” and mini-comics sold by hand at conventions are not signs of loser-ness, but of “awesomeness,” he said – they show that you can manage and navigate the real world as well as fantasy.

The Revenge of the Geeks has been lavishly rendered by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s recent film, “The Social Network” (book by Ben Mezrich), which chronicles and snarkily champions the asbergersy genius of the Mark Zuckerbergs over the old-money noblesse-obligey veneer of the WASP ancien régime. Meanwhile, in another realm of geekdom, it was inspiring to hear two American-born artist-writers named Brynn and Gene discussing their respective Chinese and Korean-Japanese families’ career expectations (“any specialty of doctor is okay”) and ways in which comics, graphic novels and even traditional poetic forms can eloquently render complex experiences of class, ethnicity, gender, alienation, tragedy and yes, even comedy – to capture the heroic quotidian, and the primal struggles of mortals.

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Danger and Beauty: Stories We Tell to Live

Posted on October 4, 2010 by carolyncooke| Leave a comment

We were talking about the intersection of information and atmosphere in the short stories of the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. What kind of consciousness and expectation does the reader bring to stories “about” Haiti? The challenge for Danticat is to subvert what we thought we knew, to write with the authority of observed detail, even detail observed inarguably in the imagination or passed down generations, hardened to a gemlike consistency. The challenge is to suggest (but not slavishly replicate) the sensations of lived life, to break down the distancing wall of our pity and evoke rather than merely name the atrocities – rape, suicide, dislocation, poverty, torture, murder – that
humans suffer at one another’s hands.

The job of the reporter is to give us facts and evidence, causes and effects. The job of the fiction writer is to refuse the simple story we thought we knew, to inscribe indelible marks on our soul. The artist Francis Bacon said, “I look for phrases that cut me.” This strikes me as a fairly accurate description of the serious and complex experience of reading Danticat, whose stories again and again reveal stark beauty of the hard thing said simply: “Madame Roger came home with her son’s head.” Or, “Her teeth were a dark red, as though caked with blood from the initial beating during her arrest.” Or, “The woman we had been staying with carried her dead son by the legs.” “All of these women were here for the same reason. They were said to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds on fire.”

The risk of repelling the finer sensibilities of the reader is one risk of writing beautifully about danger and survival. Offending fellow survivors is another. In his essay “Return to Sender,” Mark Doty speaks of writing a memoir that ended his relationship with his father. “If there is meaning in this,” Doty writes, “it is that art cannot be counted on to mend the rifts within or without. Its work is to take us to the brink of clarity.” Writing does not alleviate suffering. Doty’s father’s silence “is a burning in which I reside.”

Survival stories – the stories we tell to live – may be realist or postmodern, geopolitical or personal. They may find forms of beauty in the most harrowing things. Indeed the act of reading – of taking the hard stories of others into our own skins – may even expand and intensify human suffering, which is one definition of consciousness.

This Saturday night (October 9th) at the Litquake Lit Crawl, students and faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies’ MFA Department present “Danger and Beauty: Stories We Tell To Live.” 7:15-8:15 p.m. at the Women’s Building, Room A, 3543 18th Street, San Francisco. Readers include Sarah Stone, April Serr, Brynn Saito, Pauline Reif, and Carolyn Cooke.

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The Novel, Unplugged

Posted on July 20, 2010 by carolyncooke| 1 Comment

Did you happen to see the essay on the back page of yesterday’s (July 18, 2010) New York Times Book Review? It’s by Gary Shteyngart (also interviewed by Deborah Solomon in the Sunday mag about his new novel Super Sad True Love Story – the greedy gut!). It’s called “Only Disconnect,” and is a witty take on “unplugging” for a weekend in upstate New York and reading a novel instead of playing with his iphone:

“I open a novel, A Short History of Women, by Kate Walbert, a book I will grow to love over the coming week, but at first my data-addled brain is puzzled by the density and length of it (256 pages? How many screens will that fill?), the onrush of feeling and fact, the surprise that someone has let me not into her Facebook account but into the way other minds work. I read and reread the first two pages understanding nothing. Big things are happening. World War I. The suffragist movement. Out of instinct I almost try to press the text of the deckle-edged pages, hoping something will pop up, a link to something trivial and fast. But nothing does. Slowly, and surely, just as the sun begins to swoon over the Hudson River and another Amtrak honks its way past Rhinebeck, delivering its digital refugees upstream, I begin to sense the world between covers, much as I sense the world around me, a world corporeal and complete, a world that doesn’t need the press of my thumb, because here beneath the weeping willow my input is meaningless.”

How cool for Kate, her book as the delivery mechanism for such a revelation.

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